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Saturday, January 17, 2015

Unit of Study: Eric Carle

You've probably already heard the news that we launched our new Literacy Unit of Study this week. We are studying the author/illustrator Eric Carle! We have read a few of his books this year, but we are now digging deeper into how Eric Carle writes and illustrates his amazing books. We started this unit by putting lots of his books on the rug and just looking at them, noticing and wondering things about the books.

After we explored his books for a while, we did a community writing project and listed things that we noticed about his books after just looking at them!

We visited Eric Carle's website and sent him an e-mail. He is now 85 years old and does not respond to all of his e-mails, but he does have a newsletter and we subscribed to that. Each day during our Morning Meeting, we visit his website and go to the Frequently Asked Questions section to learn a few more things about him. Be sure to ask your Kindergartner what they know about him so far…they should be able to tell you how he makes his pictures, what his first book was (The Very Hungry Caterpillar), what comes first when he writes a book…words or pictures (Eric Carle says you need an IDEA first!), how long it takes him to write a book (It depends…he wrote The Little Cloud in one week but it took him two years to write Do You Want To Be My Friend?!), his favorite book that he has written (Do You Want To Be My Friend? because it is about friendship) and even when he grew his beard! We are learning so much about him!

Here are a few of the books we read this week during our Interactive Read Aloud time…

When we went to Computers with Mrs. Fleck this week, we saw a video of Eric Carle reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar and we created caterpillars using the Tux Paint program. In Art, Ms. Mathieson showed us a video about how Eric Carle makes his pictures and we are going to do that in Art. We even had a student go home and research Eric Carle online. She brought in the information she found and shared it with the class! We are very excited to keep learning more about Eric Carle and look forward to sharing our learning with you!